Olive, you are trying to sit and look at a lot of things in your life right now and you are trying to think about your own happiness and quality of life for your future. What is concerning about what you have shared is how you believe that you can't be happy in any career, also that you have individuals in your life that have very definite ideas about what they want and how they need you to fall in line with their agendas and that includes how your job has a lot of demands on you where you work a lot of hours and you don't get paid adequately for all the time and effort demanded of you.

Up until this point in your life you have been "learning" and a part of that learning includes learning how to "manage" a lot of different things. You learned how to manage your studies, manage your time when it came to your education and managing your study time while you learned different subjects in school and in college. Even with your current job that you have to work a lot of hours doing, you have learned how to manage that even though you dislike it and feel you are underpaid. Even in this relationship, you have been learning how to manage that as well. Also, you have managed "change" too, you learned how to adjust to the change from high school to college, the change from living at home to living away from home, from living with your parents to living with someone new that is culturally different than what your family environment had been. There is a "value" in all of this history for you. You have been able to "adapt" as a human being. However, one thing you need to think about managing is your thinking that you can't be happy in a career or that you will need to sacrifice your own happiness to thrive.

The human brain really does take time to "mature" and one of the things that "gradually" matures over time is the frontal cortex where as one "learns" and experiences life, that person gradually gains more control when it comes to reasoning verses that part not being developed enough to screen out the emotional part of the brain called the amygdala. Of course when you began this relationship you sat with your partner and shared "dreams of" things you could experience together in the future. It's not at all surprising that in these four years while both of you experienced more life and learned more that you are at a stage where your frontal cortex is more developed where you are thinking about things on a different level.

It's not surprising that you can't really say or conclude what you will want on different things or how you will "feel" about decisions you make "now" in three or four years from now. It's not surprising you don't really "know" how you will feel down the road and that you have stress about making decisions "now", major decisions. Your partner is at a point in his life where he too has matured and learned and he has been thinking about the life path he will be more comfortable with and he has decided that he doesn't want to have a family and children. Well, you genuinely can't really say how you "feel" about making that kind of decision for yourself, it's ok if you really don't know or are not ready to make that choice. Truth is you are really not at a place in your own development to make a "life" choice like that. Yes, you have learned to manage a lot of things, you have matured a lot, yet, you have not yet managed a change where you can feel happier in your job and overall life "yet". Also, you happen to have strong minded individuals in your life that are trying to manage "your" life. Well, you need to learn how to manage that too and find your way forward for yourself and your own happiness more. It's OK to spend more time managing your own life path and making changes. You can do that and you can manage, but you need more time and experiences before you can truly commit to any long term life choice. The fact that you don't know how you feel about things means you are not "ready" to know that "yet".